What Marissa Mayer Doesn’t (and Does) Get About White-Collar Work

illustration: Paul Sahre

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned her employees from working at home earlier this year, she sparked a culture war over How We Work Today. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” the head of Yahoo HR wrote in a memo. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Pundits and executives said Mayer was nuts: Telecommuting offers family-friendly flexibility, and research shows that people who work remotely are far more productive, right? Others shot back in her defense, citing the “water-cooler effect”: You only get innovative, breakthrough ideas when staff work face-to-face and exchange ideas serendipitously. Back and forth the accusations raged, as the combatants hurled management theory and pop science like mud balls.

The problem is, both sides are right. Telework makes you more productive, and working together makes you more creative. And therein lies a paradox. The real challenge for people who run modern organizations is understanding what type of thinking they want to do, not where to do it.

When we talk about being “creative,” we usually mean dreaming up bold, weird new ideas. And plenty of anecdotes suggest that truly innovative ideas emerge from informal chats over coffee or unplanned meetings, mixing disparate areas of expertise. (The Post-It note was born when a 3M employee who hated how bookmarks fell out of his church hymnal picked up on a colleague’s stalled project involving a newly developed lightweight adhesive.)

The real challenge for organizations is understanding what type of thinking they want to do, not where to do it.

Three years ago, Isaac Kohane, a professor at Harvard Medical School, gathered some hard data on this. He looked at 35,000 biomedical papers published from 1999 to 2003, each with at least one Harvard author. Then he measured how influential the papers were, based on how often they’d been cited by other academics.

Geography trumped: The physically closer that the first author listed on the paper was to the last, the more influential their paper became. “It’s whether we can chat and have extemporaneous talks,” Kohane says. “It’s serendipity.”

Subsequent work has reproduced his findings. An Arizona State team studied three tech firms using “sociometric badges” that monitored location and proximity to track employee interaction. Again, face-to-face won out. On days the teams were most creative, they were also closest to each other and most physically active. “We have this myth that you do your best work when you’re alone, and it’s not true,” says Ben Waber, president of Sociometric Solutions and inventor of the badges.

Productivity and creativity can be polar opposites.

On the other hand, organizations also need productivity—six hours of mental peace to finish a single complex piece of work. For that type of task, people usually crave being anywhere but the office. And they’re usually right: Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom took employees at a huge Chinese travel agency and randomly assigned some to work from home while others worked in the office. Sure enough, in terms of sheer amount of work, the stay-at-homes did 13 percent more overall. Bloom’s previous studies found that firms with policies that allowed remote work were more productive in general than the companies that didn’t have such policies in place.

Plus, remote work lets people operate efficiently at the weird hours they’re most “on.” Many programmers perform best when they can go on a long march from, say, 10 pm to 4 in the morning—which is why so many high tech firms let valuable coders telework. “They can roll out of bed and be at work in two minutes,” says David Fullerton, vice president of engineering at Stack Exchange, where almost half the staff works remotely.

Productivity and creativity, in other words, can be polar opposites. So how to find a balance?

One-size-fits-all policies—like the one at Yahoo—are too crude for today’s white-collar toil.

The trick here is for groups to employ a new skill: metacognition. That’s thinking about thinking. Rather than obsessing over the apparent dichotomy between productivity and creativity, managers and employees need to assess what type of mental work they’re doing on any given day and gravitate to where it’s best suited. Doing Mad Men–style “aha” groupthink? Stay in the office. Need to crush that 90-page memo on paper-clip appropriations? Seems like the kind of thing best handled at home, possibly in your underwear. One-size-fits-all policies—like the one at Yahoo—are too crude for today’s white-collar toil.

Telework has been an easy option for only a decade. “Thinking work” is invisible and hard to observe accurately. Waber studied one company where a handful of superstar programmers complained that they could only be productive at home. So leave them home, right? Except Waber found that when these stars worked in the office, the firm’s productivity as a whole soared, because they’d answer other coders’ questions. Let them work from home and everyone suffered.

Some companies have hacked this metacognition problem with staggered hours: At the mobile-music-app company Smule, employees must work in the office three days a week during traditional business hours; otherwise they can be anywhere. This neatly ensures that employees inhabit both landscapes of thought. When chewing over deep aspects of code, “it’s really useful for our team to be together and just brainstorming,” says Prerna Gupta, Smule’s chief product officer. Then they leave to execute the work singly.

Yet Gupta also tells me something I’ve heard from many entrepreneurs: Ultimately it’s hard to draw lines between such nebulous phenomena as creativity and productivity. She finds her best creative bursts happen while she’s isolated at home. “There’s a solitary type of creativity that happens,” she notes, “from sitting alone and thinking quietly.” Meanwhile, Waber has also found that productivity can boom inside the office when workers share tips on managing problems.

The smartest organizations will be the ones that understand these subtleties and flow with them. The only way to win this culture war is not to play.